It seems the super-Hurricane Sandy is not joking, and is heading to the East coast and North of the USA. The visit of Sandy to the USA will disturb all electronic voting systems in the USA, and will shut down the electricity in some areas, and maybe will push Obama to declare emergency and martial law!

Is there any chance that Sandy will reduce the chances of Obama to win this election!?

I wonder if Obama will learn from the mistakes of G.W. Bush Bush's lagging response to 2005's Hurricane Katrina?

It certainly helps that the current FEMA director, W. Craig Fugate, was an emergency paramedic who also had administrative experience in fire rescue and in emergency preparedness and response. Compare him to Bush's FEMA director (and crony) Michael "Brownie" Brown, a mediocre attorney with zero emergency preparedness experience.

Hurricane Sandy is a diversionary tactic used by democrats to draw attention away from the economy

I wonder if this storm just handed the election to Romney? If enough people on the east coast can't get to voting stations because they are displaced or too busy with storm cleanup, could Pennsylvania and New Jersey vote Romney? That's 34 electoral college votes...

Well, maybe it will be a political recovery, but economically speaking, the super-storm Sandy may push the USA into a recession.
Only to restore the power in New York it will take more than a week. And it is expected that the cost for clean up is around 20bn!!

"President Barack Obama scrapped plans to campaign Wednesday in the pivotal battleground state of Ohio and will stay in Washington, D.C., to monitor the federal government's response to the superstorm, the White House said."

Joined: 06 Jan 2011Posts: 604Location: California - the land of fruits and nuts

Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2012 6:06 pm Post subject:

nomad soul wrote:

Barbaros wrote:

I wonder if Obama will learn from the mistakes of G.W. Bush Bush's lagging response to 2005's Hurricane Katrina?

It certainly helps that the current FEMA director, W. Craig Fugate, was an emergency paramedic who also had administrative experience in fire rescue and in emergency preparedness and response. Compare him to Bush's FEMA director (and crony) Michael "Brownie" Brown, a mediocre attorney with zero emergency preparedness experience.

"Following Superstorm Sandy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has received good grades from politicians and even some survivors of the storm. In part, that's due to lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina seven years ago.

For Staten Island resident Deb Smith, whose house was flooded by the storm surge from Sandy, FEMA has been a savior.

"What a hell of an organization. I got on the phone with them yesterday, I got my claim number in already, the guy said he's going to call me in a couple of days," she says. "He's going to come out and estimate, and they said, listen, whatever doesn't work, they're going to help us put stuff in storage."

The reviews are almost as glowing from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and other local officials in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. They've praised FEMA for being prepared before the storm and responsive immediately afterward — which did not happen when Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Agency Gets A Makeover

"FEMA is a very different organization than it was during Katrina," says Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

Lieberman chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which helped spur post-Katrina reforms at the agency. Those changes, Lieberman says, have proved themselves during Sandy.

"[FEMA] was proactive, and it didn't used to be. It doesn't wait for the storm to hit; it pre-positions personnel, equipment, food supplies, water, etc.," he says.

FEMA had hundreds of thousands of liters of bottled water, along with millions of meals, cots and blankets stockpiled, which were moved into the region ahead of Sandy.

The agency also had President Obama sign disaster declarations before the details of those disasters were fully known. Lieberman says that was important, too, to start the money flowing immediately to local governments and survivors.

"You used to have to fill out a lot of paperwork to get eligibility for disaster assistance from the president. Today, they're being much more commonsensical about it," he says.

Federal officials say FEMA has some $3.6 billion in its Disaster Relief Fund and billions more available in other accounts, if needed. It has already begun spending that money. Some $19 million has gone out to storm victims to pay for temporary housing."